Appearing atop Google’s search results used to be the exclusive right of Web celebrities and Fortune 500 companies. Starting this week, your mom is just as likely to show up at the top of those results — providing she uses Google’s still fledgling social network, Google+.The change represents a fundamental shift, as Google’s algorithm-driven search is going through a social overhaul as it attempts to head off the threat of disruption from socially focused companies, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The new Google service, called “Search, plus Your World,” is part of that effort.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39444/Also see:Google search changes are bad for the internet, says Twitter
Google has angered Twitter and faces accusations of “warping” its search results and breaking antitrust rules by boosting posts from its Google+ social network in its standard search results.The changes, which are presently only being implemented in the US via google.com, mean that when people search for information, particularly about individuals, while logged in to Google+, results from the social network will be prominently displayed on the first page of results along with other results from the wider web.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/11/google-search-changes-internet-twitterGoogle catches heat over social search
Google announced Tuesday that it was making some radical changes to search by incorporating Google+ information into its search results.The move has drawn some criticism from Twitter. Twitter and Google used to have an agreement to use Twitter information for real-time search and news results, but that contract expired this summer. Tuesday, Twitter’s general counsel, Alex Macgillivray, said on his Twitter account that it was a “bad day for the Internet” saying that search has been “warped.”
www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-catches-heat-over-social-search/2012/01/10/gIQAdAhxoP_story.htmlIf Only Search and Social Could Just Get Along
Yesterday, Google and Twitter aired some dirty laundry that had been stagnating after a deal to include tweets in Google search died this past summer. It all came to a head after Google started featuring private social networking content in search — but only content from its own Google+ and Picasa.Twitter lead the charge of critics, saying this was an egregious move for the search company whose mission is to “organize the world’s information.” Meanwhile, Google said that the restrictions Twitter puts around its data make it impossible to search properly.But this problem of indexing, archiving, sorting and searching the mountains of data across online social networks is bigger than that one spat.
http://allthingsd.com/20120111/if-only-search-and-social-could-just-get-along/